I have to echo what Stephen, Lisa and Emily have said thus far. I think the How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (HTCS) website was more convincing. Though like my fellow bloggers, a fair amount of this could be because I believe climate change is real and caused by CO2, not solar flares. I find HTCS to become a little confusing because it is an aggregate of so much data. You have to click from link to link to link, whereas on Friends of Science (FS) you are immediately hit with confusing graphs when you click on the link.
The two websites really show how numbers can be manipulated to prove completely opposing points. Though one thing to note is that the graph on FS about the earth is cooling uses a best fit line. Best fit lines are made to ignore outliers. Which is problematic as we saw in the Ozone debate. For a while there seemed not to be a hole in the ozone layer because the machine was programmed to ignore outliers. For this reason FS is not convincing for me. Though I can see how they're immediate graphs might be more convincing to someone who wants a quick answer and is uninterested in clicking multiple hyperlinks.
I think it is important to look at each website's methodology in order to make our own decisions about climate change. The numbers can be skewed in a variety of ways. So, what is their reason behind each decision to keep or toss out a piece of data?
Until we get at this we cannot really know how to decide for ourselves. Especially because the debate around climate change is so contentious due to the wide reaching implications of accepting either position.
Consider, why is there such fierce competition around the science of climate change? How should we make sense of and evaluate the scientific claims these two competing websites make? Is one of the sites more convincing than the other? If so, why?
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